Using Keynote Magic Move

Magic Move allows you to create custom animated transitions between slides. Elements will smoothly move from their positions on one slide to their positions on the next. You can use this to emphasize objects or create a flow between slides instead of jumping between completely different screens. You can animate images and other objects, and also create special effects between the words or characters in text boxes.

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Magic Move in Keynote.

I'm using Keynote version 6. I'm going to show you how to use Magic Move which is a transition between two slides that animates the elements on the two slides.

So the first thing I'm going to do is populate this sample presentation with a slide that has a few images and text on it.

Here I have a slide that has two images and a text box. You can have anything. You can have charts on there, anything you want, as long as you are going to have the same elements from one slide to the next. It doesn't have to be exactly the same elements but only the identical elements will animate.

So what we want to do here is duplicate this slide so we have two identical slides. I'll control click on it and Duplicate. Now I've got two identical slides and it is the best place to start.

I'm going to select the first one and go to Animate over here and Add an Effect. The effect I want to add is Magic Move. It is going to give me a little explanation of what it is which is what I am going to show you. Now we have Magic Move between these two slides.

So the next thing I want to do is to go to the second slide and move one of these elements. Let's, for example, move this image here, move this image here, and move the text up here.

Now what will happen is that the Magic Move will figure out that this is the same as this and will animate them between slides. So let's hit Play and see what happens.

I'm on this first slide and going to click the right arrow to go to the second slide. You can see how those three elements moved from positions in the first slide, slide number two, to the second slide, slide number 3. Between here and here.

This also works with things like scaling and arrangements. For instance, let's go back to what we had before and say I want the next slide to feature this photo here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move it so that it covers the entire screen. If it wasn't already at the front I would bring it to the front here by using the Arrange panel and clicking on front.

Now I'll have it go from here to here. It is the same three elements. So what is going to happen with Magic Move is it will simply enlarge this one and have it cover everything. The cool thing is that I can Copy this slide right here by control clicking on it and then I'm going to Paste it afterwards. Notice how the Magic Move transition got carried over so I want to remove that. Set it to None. But I do want this one to do Magic Move.

So what will happen is I have the same three elements in all three slides. I go from here, to here, to here. So I basically put that one back. Let's say in this one I want this picture to fill the space. Basically in this presentation I could be talking about these images here. I also want this to go to the front here. There we go. So we go from this, to this, to this and then let's do it again where I copy it, paste down here. I want to make sure Magic Move is in the right place, so None for that and for this one I want Magic Move. Now it will go back to the original of what was there.

So go through the sequence. I can talk about that picture and talk about that picture, and it goes back to this and I can advance to my next slide.

Now there is also another type of Magic Move. I've created a last slide here where I just changed the text. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to add, I've already added the Magic Move effect here between these two slides and the pictures obviously don't move but the text changes. What it is going to do, it is going to figure out, it going to be smart enough to figure out there is one text field on this screen and then one on this screen. Then I can do a By Word or By Character Magic Move.

So By Word what it is going to do is pick out words that are the same between the two and create this kind of effect. There is only one word that is the same. That is the word camera and it works out quite nicely for this. You can see what it does there. If I did the Magic Move By Character then it moves around letters. So that was quite nice. Both of those are interesting effects that you can do with Magic Move.

There are also some other options here. For instance, how quickly the transition happens. Kind of whether it eases in and out or neither and goes at a linear speed. How long the duration is between the two slides and what to do with completely unmatched objects. You probably want it to fade. So if I had an image at the beginning here and it just wasn't on any other slides it would just fade out when it goes to the second slide and then not appear again.

Then, of course, for any transition you can set it whether it happens automatically. Whether the slide just advances by itself after a delay or whether you have to do the normal advancement of slides by clicking or hitting the right arrow.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Keynote Magic Move”

Erik Lorenz Petersen

12/10/13 @ 10:08 am

Great video, and thanks for using nice images from Copenhagen :-)

Luciana

2/14/14 @ 6:43 am

Hi Gary Rosenzweig!
I wonder how to create the same effect as “magic move by character” with version ‘9 of Keynote … by any chance do you know how to do that?
thank you very much for your help :)
Luciana